Software

• PyFR v0.3.0 was released.
• Exa released PowerFLOW 5.1 with a 300% speedup.
• ANSYS SpaceClaim 2015 service pack 1 is now available.

People and News

• A freshman at Utah State won the Siemens PLM Student Design Contest for his CAD model of an 18th century steam engine.
• The CAD Society announced this year’s award winners including Jon Peddie (Lifetime Achievement Award), Bob Deragisch and Jon Jarrett (Joe Greco Community Award). Their Leadership Award will be announced at COFES next week.
• HPC is dying and MPI is killing it.

Applications

Simulation of oxidative coupling of methane. Solution from STAR-CCM+. Image from CD-adapco. Click image for article. [Note: I love this image. It’s very cool. Plus, I am a big fan of whitespace in design. But I cropped this image to remove what was IMO excessive whitespace and in the process removed CD-adapco’s watermark. I’ll put it back in if they ask.]

• Intelligent Light participated in the DoE’s recent Atmosphere to Electrons workshop and shared their thoughts on CFD post-processing requirements for wind turbine simulations that range from airfoil to full site.
• A proposal in Formula 1 to ban the use of wind tunnels and instead rely more on CFD is meeting opposition. For example, “CFD is a splendid thing, but it is simply not a tool which works in isolation of wind tunnels.” [I tend to agree.]

Rejected by FYFD

I like to tease FYFD‘s Nicole Sharp because it’s hard to find something about fluid dynamics she either hasn’t already covered or isn’t lame. Here are my two latest rejections.

• buckling instability of crown sealing
• Physicists figure out why honey falls in twists

Making the Bad Look Good

There are few things worse in a grid than intersecting triangles. You could have a surface mesh that folds back on itself. (Or is it the CAD surface?). You could have two surface meshes (or faceted geometry surfaces) that intersect for any of a number of reasons. (Ever do an underhood geometry and have a component of the engine pierce the hood?) Advancing fronts or layers may collide. A tet mesh might not be able to properly recover its boundary. The list goes on and on.

But artist Peter Schmidt makes a bad grid look good in his painting from 1971 titled Intersecting Triangles.

Peter Schmidt, Intersecting Triangles, 1971. Image from The Peter Schmidt Blog. Click image for link.

Peter collaborated frequently with musician Brian Eno on the latter’s album covers and and the duo’s Oblique Strategies card deck, a series of quotes for overcoming obstacles (for example, “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”).